Requirements document relations

Abstract

Relations between requirements are part of nearly every requirements engineering approach. Yet, relations of views, such as requirements documents, are scarcely considered. This is remarkable as requirements documents and their structure are a key factor in requirements reuse, which is still challenging. Explicit formalized relations between documents can help to ensure consistency, improve completeness, and facilitate review activities in general. For example, this is relevant in space engineering, where many challenges related to complex document dependencies occur: 1. Several contractors contribute to a project. 2. Requirements from standards have to be applied in several projects. 3. Requirements from previous phases have to be reused. We exploit the concept of “layered traceability”, explicitly considering documents as views on sets of individual requirements and specific traceability relations on and between all of these representation layers. Different types of relations and their dependencies are investigated with a special focus on requirement reuse through standards and formalized in an Object-Role Modelling (ORM) conceptual model. Automated analyses of requirement graphs based on this model are able to reveal document inconsistencies. We show examples of such queries in Neo4J/Cypher for the EagleEye case study. This work aims to be a step toward a better support to handle highly complex requirement document dependencies in large projects with a special focus on requirements reuse and to enable automated quality checks on dependent documents to facilitate requirements reviews.